MONTPELIER During the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival in early June I attended a Monday night show featuring bass player Linda Oh and her Sun Pictures Quartet. Maybe two-thirds of the way through the concert I looked across the room from my seat at FlynnSpace and noticed a man sketching during the show. I watched him as he looked down to draw and up to see what the performers were doing. I watched him at least as much as I watched Oh and her group.

I was fascinated. I watched art being created on stage, then I watched art being created from art.

I walked across the room after the show and introduced myself to the artist. His name was Ed Epstein. He showed me his sketch of Oh, a vibrant colored-pencil portrait on compact black paper that depicted her bent slightly at the knees as she plucked the strings on her stand-up bass. I felt like I was hearing her music all over again.

Epstein told me he had been doing this sort of thing for years, sketching musicians during concerts. He gave me his card and I told him I'd be in touch. Four months later, I met Epstein in his Montpelier home that's filled with sketches and paintings he's made, mostly of musicians, for many of his 78 years.

We talked not just about art but about a life lived on his own terms. Epstein played music with Woody Guthrie, built houses and wood stoves for a living, raised two sons as a single father and spent a decade in Trinidad. He crafted his own 36-foot schooner that he lived on until striking a partially-sunken shipping container off the coast of Grenada, destroying the creation he loved. He moved back to Vermont at age 70 with $2,000 to his name and started all over again.

Epstein is slight with dark hair and a low-key energy, all of which makes him seem about 20 years younger than he is. I told him he has lived an interesting life.

"So far," he said.

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"When I was 17 I hitchhiked across the country," Epstein said. "I was part of that folk-music crowd at that time." He played guitar, mandolin and banjo, and when he arrived in California in 1953 his friend Jack Elliot suggested Epstein head to Topanga Canyon and meet with Elliot's friend, Woody Guthrie. Epstein sent Guthrie a postcard in the poetic style the folksinger favored and made plans to see him.

Epstein, who had just read Guthrie's autobiography "Bound for Glory," found his cabin at the top of the canyon. Guthrie wasn't home, but Epstein walked inside and gazed out a large picture window at the canyon and the condors flying below. He saw the postcard he sent Guthrie on a table, so he knew he had the right place. Guthrie came home a little later, the two chatted and Guthrie asked the teenaged Epstein to sit in with him at concerts for the next couple of weeks.

Artist Ed Epstein pictured Wednesday in Montpelier with some of the sketches he made while watching bands perform.
(Photo:
ALDEN PELLET/for the FREE PRESS
)

Epstein has played music throughout his life, including during his time in Vermont, where the New York City native moved in 1969. "I was a serious cellist for 35 years 'til my fingers started wearing out," he said. He played steel drums for hours a day in Trinidad.

He's been a visual artist throughout his life, too. He fanned dozens of his musician sketches across his kitchen table, recalling the black-and-white sketch he made of jazz vibraphone player Gary Burton at the Barre Opera House and the similarly loose drawings of Bob Dylan and The Band from a concert at the Forum in Montreal in the 1970s.

Epstein remembers gazing through a thick cloud of pot smoke that rose toward his nosebleed seats at the old hockey arena and capturing the images of Dylan and The Band that he saw on stage. He also remembers his reaction to the ticket prices four decades ago — $7.50 in U.S. currency.

"I was so outraged. 'Dylan, this millionaire, why is he charging seven and a half dollars for this?'" Epstein wondered at the time. He thought about skipping the concert on principle, but in the end the art won out. "I was glad we went in," he said, "because I got the sketches."

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His early black-and-white sketches are more free-form than the colorful, fleshed-out drawings he makes now on black paper. He illustrated the cover for Vermont musician Doug Perkins' CD last year. Epstein attended a concert at Montpelier City Hall this month by local pianist Michael Arnowitt and sketched two of the Vermont musicians who performed with him, trombone player Dan Silverman and standup bass player Robinson Morse. Epstein's broad, colorful strokes evoke the improvisation, movement and energy he sees and feels from the stage.

"It's an attempt to capture the music in a way," Epstein said. "For me, they're representations of the music. You see people at work. Each one of these are people working at what they do, and it's a different art form than what I am doing."

Epstein can't put his finger on how, but he knows the music seeps into his art while he's sketching. "I get into music on a different level when I'm drawing," he said. "Playing music, you're 'in the zone,' as they say. Drawing while the music is going on is another zone to work in. It's a different part of the consciousness."

Epstein's strategy is simple. "I usually start with what I see — here's the scene, somebody's playing," he said. His work is realistic but more Impressionistic than literal. He doesn't focus on the little things like a musician's shoelaces or the keys of a saxophone. "It's got to be convincing — not with the details, but with the feeling."

I asked Epstein if he has seen changes in his art, good or bad, over the years. "Being an artist is very frustrating, no matter what it is. You're trying to do the impossible." The impossible, he said, is trying to put live music into a non-live form, a pencil sketch. "Every once in awhile something magic happens."

Is that why he keeps doing art, to chase that magic? "I can't tell you why I keep doing it," he said. "I keep doing it because I would feel endlessly guilty if I didn't."

He acknowledges he's insecure and that he gave up painting for years because he was afraid of failure. "Artists are fools. 'What are you trying to do? Who do you think you are, Rembrandt?'" Epstein said. "A lot of people like my work better than I do. That's the artist's curse."

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He showed a DVD in his living room with music from his old steel-drum band back in Trinidad. Epstein's black-and-white sketches of his band members flew across the screen, creating their own visual music as the band's sound filled the background. The DVD is more than a decade old, but Epstein hummed along as if he were still playing.

A collection of work by artist Ed Epstein pictured Wednesday at Esptein’s home in Montpelier.
(Photo:
ALDEN PELLET/for the FREE PRESS
)

As I made my way out of his living room I reiterated my impression that Epstein has lived a great life, the life he wanted to live. He said he's made a few mistakes along the way, but others tell him he's been lucky. "You make your own luck," Epstein said. Anyone can do what he's done, he told me. "People are afraid."

He walked me and a photographer to his front porch, where on this warm mid-October day he noticed the bicycle he bought in July. He vowed to pedal 600 miles before winter came; he only got as far as 592, he said. With that he was off. Ed Epstein had eight more miles to ride.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.